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ABSTRACT
Eric Sheppard's call for the broadening of the GIS research agenda emerged within the context of the 1990s debates between the GIS community and human geographers. Sheppard envisaged the development of GIS as a social technology. The transformation of geographic information systems has not occurred, however. Four reasons are identified for this lack of transformation: the continued positivist assumptions of GIS practitioners; the limitations of the computer technology; the commercially oriented development of GIS; and the hype and popular momentum of GIS in geography, These present limitations cast a gloomy outlook for the transformation of GIS into a social technology in the future.